THE NEXT DAY, Granita is away from her palace — and the day after that she’s back, but nothing is said of what happened between us in the observation dome. It’s as if it never happened. I can’t say I’m surprised — it’s a not-uncommon morning-after reaction — but I’m slightly hurt after the whispered endearments of the night before. I still bear the bite marks and aches of her engagement, although they’re fading fast.

I’ve got nothing officially to do — and how do you practice to control a Creator, anyway? — but there’s a well-equipped gym in one of the basement levels, and among its facilities there’s a salle with a plentiful supply of zombies to slaughter. I make frequent use of it, working myself into near exhaustion to the point where I have to visit the in-house repair shop. But after three days of workouts, I can be sure that Juliette’s reflexes have implanted themselves in me. It’s almost spooky, as I find myself responding to half-glimpsed movements with reactions I wasn’t aware of. I have to be careful when I venture into the public halls where Granita’s cadre of asslickers hold their indolent court.

Speaking of Juliette, I find myself dreaming of her all the time now. Mostly it’s the usual — flashbacks and incoherent memories of the more exciting and unpleasant incidents in her life, which was busy enough for an entire lineage — but sometimes it’s as if I’m sitting beside a heavy curtain, and she’s just on the other side, and I’m listening to her talking. I’ve got the oddest feeling that she can see through the curtain and knows what’s happening to me, as if the traffic in memories runs both ways. Probably it’s meaningless. I wore her soul chip for long enough that I’ve picked up more of her inner voice than is normally the case with my dead sibs; that, and the fact that she didn’t, in fact, kill herself, leaves me with a much more vivid impression of her presence than usual.

On my sixth night in Granita’s palace (lying alone — for my mistress hasn’t taken me to bed since our assignation in the observation dome) I can almost hear her pacing up and down beside me. “You’re an idiot, Freya. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Why did you fall for it?”

I try to protest. “It’s not my fault! She got to the local Jeeves before I did, and who else was I to go to? I had my orders!”

She snorts. “She got to Reginald, you mean, because she had inside information. You’re the one without the excuse, sis. Who do you think ordered you to go see Reginald? Himself, who nailed me, and nailed Reggie. Why do you think he ordered you to kill Reggie? To distract you — or failing that, if you succeeded, to stop you from asking him what’s really going on. It’s a setup, and you walked right into it. And now you’re an arbeiter.”

“It’s not so bad,” I venture timidly. “I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been handed a shovel and told to stop thinking—”

“The fuck it isn’t!” Her contempt is fierce. “You’re a slave, kid. A slave in aristo couture is still a slave. Nobody else can push you around, but you’re going to stay a slave until you manage to lose that chip, and as long as she can make you punch yourself in the face or fuck her or cut your own breasts off if she hands you a knife and tells you what to do, you’re a robot slave. And do you know what she’s planning for you? She’s going to hand you to a Creator. And then you’ll really be a slave, two times over. He’ll make you imprint on him, and at the same time she’ll be able to tell you what to do, and you’ll never be free.”

“Freedom?” The word tastes bitter. “What’s freedom ever done for me? Seems to me I’ve been free almost all my life, but what has it gotten me? Really?”

She’s silent for only a moment. “Ask not what it’s gotten you, kid. Ask what it’s saved you from.”

I know what I ought to be feeling right now: I ought to be feeling bleak existential despair at my degraded predicament. I ought to be climbing the walls and rattling the bars. But she told me not to, and now I can’t get worked up about it — unless this imaginary nocturnal dialogue with a sister who isn’t here is my cunning way of resolving my inner conflict. “When I first met the Domina, on Venus, I was thinking about ending it all,” I remind her.

“Were you, fuck! I call you liar, Freya. You and I have both made it through a hundred and forty years. You know what the sanity decay curve is? Those of us who are going to go usually check out in the first sixty years. You’re more than two half-lives past the suicide peak.”

“But the soul chips—”

“Get mailed around the sisterhood in sequence, and you’re one of our youngest. You’re at the bottom of the pole, last in the queue. You really are fucking clueless, aren’t you?” She stops for a while, and I’m trying to get an angry rejoinder together when she starts up again. “It’s not your fault. I think we overprotected you youngsters. Between that and what happened to Rhea when they started working on the Block Three template, it’s a wonder any of you survived.”

“Rhea?” I echo stupidly.

“Hah! Did you think you graduated when that asshole Jeeves slipped you a magic pill to turn you into a mutant sexbot assassin?” She sounds amused, now. “Emma — treacherous bitch — she should have known better than to load Rhea’s off-cuts. Block Two’s poisonous enough, as you’ve discovered. As lowly borderline unemployable sex robots, we were mostly beneath notice, but once some of the sisterhood started cropping up in the wrong places, usually clutching a severed head in one hand and a knife in the other, we came into some demand. But they didn’t stop training Rhea at just two snapshots. That’s how they faked the soul chip with the suicide memories — they took a copy of her, slapped a slave override on it, and told her to get miserable. Meanwhile, our real template-matriarch was somewhere else entirely, and you’d better believe that those upgrade chips are pure nightmare.”

“But… but…” Where am I getting this stuff from? part of me wonders. I’m not usually this wildly imaginative! The rest of me is just plain indignant. “We were born to be courtesans and helpmeets, not assassins! Who did this to us?”

“Nobody,” Juliette says sadly. “We did it to ourselves. All because of that birthday. Or rather, Rhea’s doing it to us. She’s still out there—”

Sudden light and noise.

I ping back into consciousness, raising an arm to block the glare out of my too-wide eyes. “What is the meaning of this?” I demand, pushing myself up on one arm.

“Time to rise and shine, Big Slow.” I look down at the munchkin shape in the doorway. “Her bossness wants you ready to rock and stroll in thirty minutes. We dance at dawn.”

“Oh for—” I bite back on a Juliette-ism; it wouldn’t be in character. “Attend to my luggage, minion. I’ll be ready in my own time,” I drawl imperiously (or perhaps, just snottily) as Bill (or Ben) waits in the doorway. It wouldn’t do to look excited, even though I’m all a-jitter with anticipation. The game’s afoot!

THE NAME OF the game in space travel is always “hurry up and wait,” and this trip is to be no different, at least for the first few hours. But our destination, Eris, is more than ten times as far as anywhere I have traveled to before. So I’m wondering just how bad this trip is going to be while I do the waiting thing.

Arbeiters herd me back up to the reception suite, then into a large shuttle, along with my luggage (whether recovered from the hotel or cloned on the spot I can’t tell), Bill and Ben (and how did Granita contrive to get them here? That’s another interesting question), and finally Granita herself, accompanied by half a dozen small and vicious courtiers. They make polite small talk and quaff cocktails beneath her aloof gaze while the shuttle climbs toward orbit at half a gee. Luckily, they don’t seem terribly interested in me; I’m not their patron. For which I’m profoundly thankful, because my supply of small talk has been depleted by Granita’s pointed coolness, and if one of them got on my nerves, I’d be likely to cut them dead literally rather than figuratively.